John Leland

The inventors of the frug, the Watusi and the mashed potato remain unheralded, their names absent from the history books our children read in school. But the inventors of the achy breaky and the jump, currently the two ranking dance steps in America, are easily traced.

A good reference point for A "Wish," the new album by the English band the Cure, is "Back to Mono (1958-1969)," last year's boxed set of the obsessive love epics of producer Phil Spector.

I got girls, girls, girls, girls, girls, girls on my mind," sings David Byrne, normally considered one of pop's headier longhairs, on his coyly titled new album, "Uh-Oh." In this year of scaling down expectations, Byrne has found a way to lower ours of him. "Uh-Oh "completes his transition from doyen of oversophisticated urban alienation to quaint eccentric.

Nearly four decades after its debut, Nat (King) Cole's song "Straighten Up and Fly Right" has had a busy year. Cole's daughter Natalie recorded it for "Unforgettable," a tribute album of her father's songs that earned seven Grammy awards and sold more than 4 million copies, eclipsing most of that modern stuff you hear so much about.

"Hello, gorgeous," said Barbra Streisand to her Oscar in 1969, the year she won it as Best Actress for "Funny Girl." (In 1977, she won another as cowriter for Best Song.) Since then it's been "Hasta la vista, baby," for the most famous hunk of celebratory hardware in the world and the multitalented, steel-willed actress-singer-producer-writer-director.

As groundbreaking decisions go, this one seems unlikely, but there you go. Federal Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy has ruled that the rapper Biz Markie was wrong to lift, or "sample," music from Gilbert O'Sullivan's icky 1972 hit, "Alone Again (Naturally)." The judge stopped the sale of Biz Markie's "I Need a Haircut" album and ordered it pulled from stores.

There were tears in Abbey Lincoln's eyes a few weeks back as she recited the names from a Brooklyn concert stage: Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, Miles Davis, peers no longer around.

Paul Taylor likes to read aloud, especially from his own writing. For years, while he was at work on his autobiography "Private Domain," he would read paragraph after paragraph of the manuscript to visitors, as if only in performance would the sentences truly live.

There's a recurring song on Wynton Marsalis's formidable new trilogy, "Soul Gestures in Southern Blue," called "So This Is Jazz, Huh?" It is both a challenge and a history lesson.

The Commitments," Alan Parker's sometimes charming new film about an Irish rhythm and blues band, makes it's pitch early on. Soul music, a young manager tells his musicians, is the rhythm of sex ad the rhythm of the factory, too.

Two gritty, independent films attempt to define the volatile new film noir When Matty Rich started shooting his stark Straight Out of Brooklyn in the housing projects of Red Hook, a local drug dealer laid down some ground rules.